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The Digital Temple Launch Checklist
Your website is your digital temple, the room your work lives in when you're not there. This is the complete checklist we run before any client site goes live: forty-plus checks across offer, pages, findability, speed, and systems. It's free and ungated because a checklist shouldn't cost your email address. Use it to launch, or to audit what you already have.
1 · The offer
A launch fails here more often than anywhere technical.
- One primary offer, named, priced, and stated on its own page
- A stranger can say what you sell after 10 seconds on the homepage
- Every offer page answers: what happens, for whom, what changes, what it costs
- One unmistakable next step per page: book, apply, or take the free resource
2 · Pages & copy
The words are the website; the design is the frame.
- Homepage, offer page(s), about, contact, all in your real voice, human-reviewed
- Titles are 15–65 characters and name both the brand and what it does
- Every page has a meta description that states the offer plainly (70–160 chars)
- Headings ask the questions visitors actually have, and answer them beneath
- No lorem ipsum, no placeholder pages, no 'coming soon' links in the nav
- Legal pages exist and are linked: privacy policy, terms
3 · Findability (SEO · AEO · GEO)
So search engines and AI assistants can read, index, and cite you.
- robots.txt allows crawlers, including AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended), with exactly one source of truth
- sitemap.xml exists, is current, and is referenced from robots.txt
- Structured data (JSON-LD): Organization sitewide; Article/Service/FAQ on the pages that earn them, mirroring visible content word-for-word
- One stable entity: your Organization/Person schema uses the same @id on every page
- Canonical URLs set; www vs non-www resolves one way
- Open Graph title, description, and image on every page (test the share preview)
- Site verified in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools; sitemap submitted in both
- Content is server-rendered, so the copy exists in the HTML, not only after JavaScript runs
4 · Speed & experience
Slow sites lose the circling visitor at the exact moment of readiness.
- Loads fast on a real phone on cellular, not just your laptop on wifi
- Images sized and compressed; no 4MB hero photos
- Text readable and buttons tappable at mobile sizes; nothing overflows sideways
- Accessible: real heading order, alt text on meaningful images, visible focus states, AA color contrast
- 404 page exists and points somewhere useful
5 · The machinery
The half nobody sees, and the half that books the clients.
- Booking works end to end: schedule, pay, confirmation email, tested as a stranger
- Every form tested: submissions arrive, autoresponses send, you're notified
- Follow-up sequences connected: the free resource delivers, the welcome sequence runs
- Analytics installed and receiving (privacy-respecting is fine, you need signal, not surveillance)
- Domain, hosting, and email sending (SPF/DKIM/DMARC) configured and owned by YOU
- Every account and credential in your hands, not your builder's
6 · Launch day
The final pass, in order.
- SSL live; http redirects to https; no mixed-content warnings
- Click every link on every page once
- Complete one real purchase/booking yourself, refund it, confirm every email fired
- Search your brand name and confirm the site appears and the old/staging site doesn't
- Request indexing in Search Console; announce to your list and communities
If working through this list feels like a second job, that's the honest signal it might be. Everything above is exactly what we build and verify, stage by stage, in a done-for-you build. And if you're deciding between doing this yourself and hiring it out, read the honest comparison first.